Learning about the Holocaust in primary school: parents' attitudes and extended learning

Research findings amongst teachers in England (Centre for Holocaust Education, 2014) and the US (Harbaugh, 2013) suggest that a significant number of primary teachers are choosing to teach the Holocaust. While there is anecdotal evidence that parents' concerns about their primary children's learning about the Holocaust is a barrier to primary teachers including the Holocaust in their teaching programmes, there is no empirical evidence to support this. This research provides insight into this by analysing data from oral feedback from a small group of parents whose children learned about the Holocaust in their last year of primary. The children were from the same school, had the same teacher and studied the Holocaust in 2015 and 2016.

Previous findings by the investigator (Cowan and Duffy, under review) which focused on the contribution of Music on p.7 pupils' first lessons of the Holocaust, demonstrated that parents learned about the Holocaust through their children's learning at school. This paper will reflect on this type of learning which researchers refer to as 'extended learning'.

Evidence is based on data from interviews with parents which at the time of writing are scheduled to take place in June 2017. Interviews will be conducted by the research assistant following a grounded approach to qualitative data collection (cf. Charmaz, 2009). In order to develop a robust and rich interpretation of the data, emotion coding, values coding, evaluation coding and versus coding (Saldaña, 2010) will be applied.